By Jake Shultz
For this month’s Patreon blog, I have a small assortment of some unseen material from Blackout – including a map, some alternate corp logos, and some fiction.
Most of the corporate logos came together very quickly. I asked the players to throw out a prompt for the logo for their corporation, and I used that to design them. The MasKorp and ONE logos had a bit more iteration:
Shubert’s prompts for the MasKorp logo were “viking runes, katakana. Something with straight lines and blocky lettering that doesn’t look entirely English”
The general shape was kept throughout, but we went back and forth on the design a bit before settling on the QR code style.
While the QR code doesn’t actually work since it was cut out to fit in the triangles, the code itself just says “BUY MORE STUFF” over and over.
For ONE, Alex initially just prompted me with “⎅”, the symbol he had settled on for the digital currency Omnicoin. I created the first logo below from that suggestion. After talking to Alex again, he suggested something with a more “super corporate and non threatening” feel, and pointed to the Royal Bank of Canada logo. I took a pretty direct line from there, trying a few different backgrounds before we agreed on the circuit board design.
And of course, during one special month of the year, all the VanTle megacorps band together to slap rainbows on their logos in the hopes of appearing slightly less unethical then they really are.
When I posted this map in our group Discord, Alex asked “Which line should you take to avoid bedbugs?” If you want to avoid bedbugs, you may be interested in the VTC Preferred Traveler Program…
Finally, I had also started writing some short fiction set in the Blackout universe. I never got too far into it, and it’s first draft quality, but you can find it here to read about Chester Turbo HD Remix and his very bad work trip.
